the.com/churn
the slow leak that sinks ships nobody noticed taking on water
means The rate at which customers, subscribers, or employees stop using a service or leave an organization over a given period.
from From Old English 'cyrin,' the wooden vessel in which cream was beaten into butter — a word with Germanic cousins (Dutch 'karn,' related to grain and roundness). For centuries to churn meant to agitate and tumble milk until it transformed; from there it widened to any violent stirring (a churning sea, a churning stomach). The business sense — customers cycling in and out, agitated turnover never settling — is a much later figurative borrowing, reaching back to that same image of restless, ceaseless motion.
- butter origin
- churning physically agitated cream into solid butter
- cheaper to keep
- acquiring a customer costs five times retaining one
- silent killer
- five percent monthly churn nearly halves users yearly
- dairy throwback
- old churns demanded hours of arm-numbing cranking
netflix subscriber churn — lost 1.3 million subscribers in q1 2022, prompting password-sharing crackdown
amazon prime video churn — 23% annual churn rate among users in 2023, higher than netflix
peloton membership churn — lost 2.33 million subscribers between 2021-2022 after pandemic boom ended